The insights that fuel SharkNinja’s biggest innovations

Informercial Audio Clip: Much faster, much easier, and much better than ever before. 100% guaranteed.

Jeff Berman: This was what promotion for Mark Barrocas’s company sounded like in its early days. Classic late night infomercials for its mops and vacuums.

Informercial Audio Clip: This is the new Shark Steam Pocket. It is next generation steam cleaning technology. Look at the swivel.

Informercial Audio Clip: Whoa. Well, I love my regular steam mop, but this looks really new and different.

BERMAN: But insomniacs watching TV aren’t the only ones hearing about their products these days because social media influencers can’t stop talking about them organically.

Casey Kelly: Come try the Ninja CREAMi. I’ve been using this recipe every single day for almost two years. It’s literally less than 200 calories and 30 grams of protein and never gets old.

Morgan Green: For a strawberry sorbet, Ninja CREAMi. I’ll take some frozen strawberries. Of course you can-

Joey Suggs: This is my Ninja CREAMi, and I’ve been using it just about every single night over the past couple months, making some high protein, low calorie, super tasty ice cream. And I want to show you exactly how to do some of my favorite recipes.

BERMAN: SharkNinja, maker of everything from vacuums to ice cream machines, has grown into a giant, a nearly $6 billion a year business. And CEO Mark Barrocas has no plans to slow down soon.

Mark Barrocas: We develop 25 new ground up products a year, every year. I’m not talking about just repainting something or new knobs, I’m thinking about a brand new ground up product.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas reveals how he turned a struggling mop seller into a global consumer product powerhouse. We discuss the rise of the educated consumer, wildly successful ways to leverage social media, and how the company is weathering the current tariffs. Mark, welcome to Masters of Scale.

BARROCAS: Thanks so much for having me.

BERMAN: I’ve been super excited about this conversation and I want to go back and get some of the history from you. But before we do, I’m not sure that people realize how big SharkNinja is. Can you just set the stage for us and tell us how big the company is today?

BARROCAS: Yeah. Full year guidance puts us at over $6 billion of revenue this year. We’re in 37 different product categories, which I think surprised most people, as they might say, I have a Ninja air fryer or a Shark vacuum. I mean, we sell 37 different categories of products. We built two multi-billion dollar brands. We’ve never acquired a dollar of revenue in the company’s history, and we built these two brands this year that will each be over $3 billion in revenue from scratch. We’re in 26 countries around the world. And so scale, diversification, but still innovating. I mean, we still feel like there’s a lot more places for us to go inside and outside the home.

Copy LinkThe origins of SharkNinja

BERMAN: Okay. So take us back. When you joined the company, it was not called SharkNinja. So what was the company and how did you come into it?

BARROCAS: So my partner, Mark Rosenzweig, founded the company. And he and I started talking about getting together in 2007, because the business had gone through an organized restructuring, and we were a small business at the time.

BERMAN: Which is code for, it wasn’t doing great.

BARROCAS: It wasn’t. But it had some good bones to it. And he and I were best friends. And I was running a business, and he would talk about the challenges that he had in his business. And the business at the time was called Euro-Pro, and we had one brand which was Shark. And for the most part, most of the business was a product called the Shark Steam Mop, which is a product that we did way back many years ago, and still a category that we sell today. We got together in 2008. It was the start of the financial crisis.

BERMAN: Yeah. Not a great time to join a company that was struggling a bit.

BARROCAS: No, no. And honestly speaking, I mean we felt like we were both product developers. We were both marketers. I had run businesses before. But we just wanted to get together, and we felt like if we could develop one hit product a year, it would allow us to make a living. I mean, the aspirations were not: New York Stock Exchange public company.

BERMAN: But you’d had some success at this point in your career. You undoubtedly had a lot of options in front of you. And notwithstanding the fact that it’s one of your best friends, why jump into a struggling company and try to build one product a year and go in that direction?

BARROCAS: So I started a business when I was in college at University of Michigan. And I had been trained from a kid by my grandfather that you need to work for yourself. So lots of periods of success and ultimately failure. I was 27, 28 years old, I was married, my wife was pregnant, and she said, “You’ve got to go out and get a job. We can’t keep doing these entrepreneurial things.” And I went and did that. I did a stint at Aramark, which was a large public company at the time. And I came to realize that I wanted to really be more in control of my own destiny and do something that was a lot more entrepreneurial. And so I think I was frustrated where I was. I think Mark and I felt like it would be fun to work together and do this together, and it would be he and I against the world. And we jumped in feet first and did it.

BERMAN: When you and the other Mark came together, how did you build the foundation that let you start scaling?

BARROCAS: So I think we first believed that for us to build a sustainable long-term business, we had to develop the products from the ground up. We only had a few engineers in the company, so we had to build an engineering team. So that was number one. And when we started, it was all about this idea of affordable, accessible innovation. We wanted to make products for almost everyone. And people have either said to us, “Well, you either have to be in the opening price segment or you need to be in the higher price segment. There is no middle.” Well, I think we have taken the approach that we can move the opening price consumer up into our brands, but we can also be the brand of choice for premium consumers, the performance, the quality, the value where they feel like they’ve made the right buying decision.

BERMAN: What did you do to get to a place where you could start launching even just one new product a year that customers would love?

BARROCAS: Yeah. Mark and I, we would spend at least 10, 12 times a year in China. I mean, we were finding owner-operator factories that we could work with, that we could bring ideas to, and they could help us amplify and develop those ideas. We really started with this whole business around consumer insights and ethnographic research. We felt like we wanted to build our business around consumer problems. Find a consumer problem, and then come up with a solution to that problem. That sounds like, “Well, what kind of moat can you create?” I mean, can everyone find consumer problems? I will tell you that over the last 17 years, the problems that we found, they’re not surface-deep. We’re mining in two places. We’re either mining through social media, online reviews or observing consumers in their home about what could be a problem, or is the consumer doing something out of their house that they are not able to do inside their home? And I’ll give you an extreme example from that one. And that’s a product called the Ninja SLUSHi.

Copy LinkThe consumer insight behind the Ninja SLUSHi & blender

BERMAN: I know about the Ninja SLUSHi. Tell us about it.

BARROCAS: Well, it’s a great example of: consumers are going to restaurants, for example like Sonic. And they’re not even ordering any food. They’re just ordering slushies. People are going into places like 7-Eleven and they’re buying Slurpees. And so we felt like with this SLUSHi machine, you could literally pour almost anything into here that has a little bit of sugar or fructose in it, and you can turn it into this incredible frozen drink. It was just a great example. And we’ve had a number of these over the last 17 years of, what’s the consumer doing outside of the home that they’re not able to do inside the home?

BERMAN: Going back to the early days, Mark. Was there a consumer insight where you all had your first “aha” moment when you were like, “This is our next product, this is what we need to do”?

BARROCAS: Yeah. So I’ll give you a few. We looked at the blender market and we saw that all blenders had blades on the bottom, and when you put ice into them, the ice jumped up and by the time you had to pour more and more liquid in it, your drink became watery and liquidy. And you were never able to get that frozen drink consistency that you could get if you went on vacation or you went to a restaurant. And so, the fact of the matter is that consumers wanted to make frozen drinks at home, but they weren’t able to do restaurant quality frozen drinks. So we looked at it and we said, “Well, why are the blades on the bottom? Why couldn’t we put the blades going up the top?” We presented it to some people and they said, “You’re crazy. That can’t be done.” And we ultimately developed that product in 2009 and we brought it around to retailers.

And he and I would go around to gas stations and we would buy bags of ice and we would fill up these blenders with bags of ice and we would crush the ice to snow. And once you had snow, that was the consistency that you would need to make these restaurant quality frozen drinks. And we’d sit in these retailers and we’d crush the ice to snow, and we would throw the jar. And we’d put the snow on the table and we’d say to people, “Well, go feel it.” And they look at us like we’re crazy. “You want us to put our hands into this icy snow that’s on our… And by the way, you’ve made a mess.” Well anyway, we came out with our first Ninja product in 2009, and it instantly resonated with people. By 2013, we became the number one selling blender in the United States. We’ve never looked back from there. We own 40% market share today of the blender category. And that’s what catapulted this $3 billion Ninja business, from that one aha idea.

Copy LinkThe rise of the educated consumer

BERMAN: It strikes me that part of the genius of getting the blender in with the retailers was creating an experiential marketing moment in the room. You’re literally saying, “No, no, no. Touch the product, feel the product.” That’s much harder to do with a customer. So was the infomercial the way to show the customer what the product really could do, or was there something else that you were doing that helped you break through there?

BARROCAS: It absolutely was the infomercial. It’s funny, people looked at infomercials at the time and they’d say, “These are one and done products. You’re not building a business and a brand off of that.” And what we really identified back in 2008 was the world was changing. Prior to that, if you wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner, you went to the store and you bought consumer reports. And consumer reports told you the eight vacuum cleaners to buy. And if you weren’t—

BERMAN: For the younger members of our audience, this is Wirecutter before there was Wirecutter.

BARROCAS: Exactly. Exactly.

BERMAN: This is a physical magazine or book you had to go buy.

BARROCAS: It was pages. There were actual real pages. And there were eight vacuums in there. And if you weren’t one of the eight vacuums, it’d be very hard for you to be able to break through. Now, I’ll go back to a little nugget of inspiration when I was a kid growing up. And it’s interesting how you take some of these things and they impact your business decisions moving forward. Back in the mid-80s growing up in New York, there was a store called Syms, and their tagline was “The educated consumer is our best customer.”

BERMAN: Is it Sy Syms? Was that his name? Sy Syms.

BARROCAS: It was. Yes.

BERMAN: Yes.

BARROCAS: So here I was as a 13, 14-year-old kid, you’d say, why am I watching Syms commercials or why did this last with me? But I always found it interesting, the educated consumer is our best customer. In 1985 in New York, if you had a problem with a product, there was no one to tell. I mean, you returned the product to the store, you told your mom or dad or brother or sister, “Never buy this brand again or never shop.” But in 2008, the consumer was starting to get actually educated. And we felt like there was this great equalizer called online reviews. 

Okay. Now you say online reviews today. I remember in the end of 2008 being in front of a major US retailer, and they asked us about our strategy. And at the end of the meeting I said to them, “We’re going to grow our business one five-star review at a time.” And the guy looked at me like I had two heads, and he said, “That’s the dumbest idea in the world. Who’s going to write a review about your products?”

So you fast-forward and people write paragraphs and paragraphs about Shark and Ninja products. And that really helped us catapult the businesses. This idea that consumers, they were seeing the demonstrations on infomercial, they were getting educated by the products, by watching these 30 minute commercials that we were doing. They were going online and they were saying, “Hey, does this product really work?” And they were getting this feedback from all these consumers that were saying, “Yes, it worked.” This is well before social media time or anything like that. There was a groundswell of, there might’ve been brands that were around for 50 years, this was the great equalizer to that.

Copy LinkHarnessing social media and user-generated content

BERMAN: So the world of marketing has changed a lot in the last 17 years since you came into the company. What’s changed about how you’ve approached the market given that you just got fewer people watching TV and the economics have changed?

BARROCAS: Well, let’s start with every aspect of what we do in the company is centered around what’s right for the consumer. So as an example, we sell through every retail chain in every market that we’re in. Why? Because we want to be relevant wherever the consumer chooses to shop for our products. If it’s brick and mortar, great. If it’s online, great. If it’s direct to consumer, great. On the advertising side, it’s the same way. We want to be relevant wherever the consumer ingests content. And so, if I go back, yes, it was infomercials for a period of time. Then we needed to get more reach and we did have to do 30-second commercials and 15 second commercials. If I go back to 2016, it was Facebook groups. I mean, there were sometimes 30, 40,000 people in a group that would be sharing recipes or things like that about our products. And then it ultimately evolved right before COVID into social media.

And now when you say social media, it’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s Meta, it’s TikTok, it’s Reddit. It’s incredible how many searches are starting on Reddit right now. It’s Pinterest, it’s YouTube, long and short. So it continues to move where the consumer is moving to. And I think that that’s emblematic of SharkNinja. 

We constantly reinvent ourselves. I mean, we were Euro-Pro the Shark Steam Mop company, and today, eighteen-year-old high school kids think of us as the Ninja CREAMi company. And almost 2 billion impressions on social media. In the last six months, we’ve done very little advertising on the Ninja CREAMi. 99.5% of the content every month on the Ninja CREAMi is generated by consumers.

Copy LinkThe consumer insight behind the Ninja CREAMi

BERMAN: What is the Ninja CREAMi for those who aren’t familiar?

BARROCAS: So the Ninja CREAMi is an at-home ice cream maker. And I’ll take you back to the beginning of it because it started pre-COVID. We saw this insight that consumers at home were nesting more, investing in their homes and investing in their families.

BERMAN: Mark, where did this insight come from? How do you know that that’s happening?

BARROCAS: Yeah. So social media trends being in consumer homes, look at the Netflix shows that are on TV. It’s interesting over the last five or six years, look how many at-home chefs there have been developed. There was another insight which was more and more allergies and more and more dietary restrictions. I have two children that have nut allergies. It was always a pain going out to an ice cream shop and saying, “Is there cross-contamination?” What was going on? So the original insight was all these pieces converging and saying, “What could we do to make this at-home ice cream experience?” 

Over COVID, I remember being in a board meeting, this was in 2020, and one of our board members said, “What are you doing, wasting your time with this ice cream product? You should be doing something with sanitization or UV light. We’re in the middle of COVID, we’re in a pandemic.” And my honest answer to them was, “People love ice cream.” We could be in the middle of a… people love ice cream.

And so we came out with the product in 2021. And here’s what was interesting. Things that we thought the consumer were going to do with it, they did do it. They made their own recipes, they addressed their dietary restrictions or whatever it might be. But there was an amazing thing that happened in the end of 2022 which was, consumers on their own started saying, “Wow, we’re making protein shakes. What if we took those protein shakes and what if we turned them into ice cream?” And it started this whole trend of protein ice cream. That you could make a protein ice cream, it could have 250 calories, it could have 35 grams of protein, what an amazing dessert. And that catapulted this whole creator community that started developing lots and lots of different things you could do within the CREAMi.

BERMAN: So that wasn’t something where you said, “Oh, we’re starting to get some reviews that are saying people are creating protein ice cream. Let’s plow dollars into some creative around this and ads around this,” et cetera. It was more, “Let the customers show each other what they’re doing with the product, and if we can jump on the wave and accelerate it all the better.”

BARROCAS: That’s exactly right. As we started seeing these trends developing, we started doing our own recipes in it, and starting to figure out… We were partnering with protein firms that were coming to us, protein powder firms. But honestly speaking, and this is where I think it becomes so compelling and organic, is let the consumer decide what they want to do with it. Let’s not be overly prescriptive. And then we’re able to learn insights from those, and those feed the next innovation. It’s interesting, in the United States, generally speaking, when you’re successful with a product, you develop an XL version of the product.

BERMAN: Of course. Right.

BARROCAS: Okay. People love the Ninja CREAMi, but the pint’s too small. What if we had a pint and a half?

BERMAN: What if we had a gallon, Mark? Why are we holding ourselves back?

BARROCAS: Exactly.

BERMAN: Let’s go.

BARROCAS: So we went and we developed an XL CREAMi. And then just recently in February we developed a soft serve CREAMi. So at home, you could essentially… I grew up as a Carvel fan.

BERMAN: Please, Fudgie the Whale.

BARROCAS: Exactly.

BERMAN: Yeah.

BARROCAS: And so what if you could take your CREAMi and then turn it into delivering soft serve ice cream? I think the thing that’s so exciting about all of it is, people are experimenting with things and having fun.

BERMAN: Still ahead how SharkNinja instills a culture of innovation, and what it’s like weathering tariffs as a global business.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkSolving the challenge around repeat purchasing

As I hear you talk about these products, and I think about it through an investor lens, I can hear the CPG investors in my head saying, “Gosh, all sounds great, but you’re going to buy one of these once every 10 years. It’s a good product. It’s going to last a long time. You have one blender, you don’t need another blender. You splurge on an ice cream maker. Why would you buy another one?” And I imagine you’d have concerns about investing in a company that’s creating products that don’t have a high repeat purchase to them. Was that a concern early on? How did you think about that?

BARROCAS: Okay. So I’ll give you two answers to that question that were fundamental going back 15, 16 years ago. The first is, I think Mark and I recognized early on that you cannot have long-term sustainable success as a single product company, period. You’re either going to be disintermediated or you’re not relevant to a consumer on an everyday ongoing basis. You buy a product and you come back four years later when you need another product. Which is why today SharkNinja’s in 37 categories. We want to sell you two products a year, an air fryer and an air purifier, robot vacuum. 

I think the second answer to your CPG question is this. Our job is to put our products into retirement before their usable life. Our vacuum cleaners last a long time. Our blenders last a long time. But we develop 25 new ground up products a year, every year. I’m not talking about just repainting something or new knobs, I’m talking about a brand new ground up product.

So our job is at year two, you as the consumer say, “Wow, Shark or Ninja’s come out with this new product. It’s solving this next thing that’s my problem. I’ve got to go put this product into retirement. Maybe I go give it to somebody else, maybe I go retire it somewhere.” It’s no different than Apple’s business. First of all, if I think about the iPhone 16, if I’m a consumer that owns an iPhone 14 or 15, I don’t need an iPhone 16, but there’s some evolutionary improvement that they’ve made to the product that the consumer says, “I’ve got to have that.”

Copy LinkThe SharkNinja product that didn’t work

BERMAN: When you are ground up developing upwards of 30 new products a year, there have to be some where you are really fired up and they just fall flat. They just don’t work. What’s an example of one where that’s happened?

BARROCAS: Yeah. I’ll give you an example that goes back years ago. First of all, I will tell you that every product has a meandering journey. There’s no clear starting point, clear end point. I say to my team, “We’re in Boston and all we know is we want to head west. And we’re not sure if we’re going to end up in Seattle or San Diego, but we just got to head west.” The product development journey is the funnest part and the most frustrating part to some people, because every week we’re getting insights back on our products. We’re putting it in front of consumers and prototypes. And back in about 2011, we made this hand vac product, and it had enormous performance. You were able to suck up anything with this hand vacuum. You could suck up sawdust and all kinds of things. And the performance of it was amazing. And every other vacuum, it was like the Energizer Bunny, the next vacuum would be dead and the next vacuum would be dead, and this thing would just keep going and going.

And we put it on a stick vacuum and it was able to pop off. And we looked at the product and I think that we all thought the product looked a bit odd, but we drank the Kool-Aid in terms of how great the performance was of this product. And we got it into the market, and literally in the first week we realized not only is it the biggest dud, we have so much inventory of this product. And we weren’t a big company at the time, and we quickly said, “Okay, we’ve got to turn the spigot off. We’ve got to lower the price of product aggressively. We actually, we know the product is a dud. The retailer yet doesn’t know the product is a dud.” And it’s very interesting in working with retailers, if you go to someone with information proactively before they come to you, you’re a partner, you’ve given them great insights, you’re a partner. If somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, this is not working,” you’re a loser. That difference between a partner and a loser could be a week of proactive information.

And I think it’s something that we live by in the company of how do we spot the smoke early? Because if we can spot the smoke early before anyone else can, we can react, we can pivot quickly. So we dropped the price of the product. The retailers are scratching their head, the product’s only been out for two weeks and you’re already dumping the price. We dump the price. We get through the holiday season. It took us two and a half years to liquidate all of the product, all of the inventory. We finally liquidated all the inventory. Now here’s what I would say. In most companies, you would never echo a word again of the Shark Multivac, that was what the product was called. But we knew that there was a nugget of goodness, and that nugget of goodness ultimately was a lot of the inspiration behind our Shark Lift-Away innovation, that is still the number one selling vacuum cleaner in North America and the UK today.

So I think what’s important is there were some things that were really good about it. Okay, there were some things that were not good about it. But how do we take what’s good about it and not just throw the whole thing away, but reinvent it? And here from one of the biggest failures in the company’s history, gave birth to one of the biggest successes ultimately in the company’s history. So it’s interesting how that happens.

Copy LinkHow to scale a culture of curiosity

BERMAN: Well, and this is part of how companies and cultures evolve. And you’re now approaching 6 billion in revenue, thousands of employees, I’m assuming.

BARROCAS: Close to 4,000.

BERMAN: Close to 4,000 employees and global. So how are you defining and promulgating and reinforcing your cultural principles so that this iterative development process, just an example of it, it permeates the company.

BARROCAS: If people ask me, “What is SharkNinja’s biggest competitive advantage?” It’s not disruptive innovation, it’s not viral marketing. It’s not two multi-billion dollar brands. It’s not 4,000 patents. It’s the way we think, genuinely the way we think. 

Now, you could sit here and say, “The way you think. That doesn’t sound like such a big competitive advantage.” There is no clear path on how to get there. I mean, there was no clear path of, how do we go from a $150 million business in 2008 to a $6 billion business today. But you got to be an explorer. And being an explorer means everything is just a speed bump. It’s not an obstacle, it’s not a roadblock, it’s a speed bump. You’ve got to be able to constantly spot the smoke. You’ve got to be willing to pivot. We use this term a lot in the company, which is we reserve the right to get smarter.

I can’t tell you how many senior executives say, “This is the direction that we’re going.” And regardless of whether they’re about to run over a cliff, because they’ve said this is the way they’re going… We’re able to turn around. 

I got up in front of a town hall meeting Q3 of last year, and I said to the team, “Look, we had a great year in 2024, but I did some things that were stupid. And now that I’ve recognized that they’re stupid, I am going to choose to change those things because I want to un-stupid myself.” And it actually turned into this term around the company where people said, “We want to be un-stupid.” So I think it’s this idea of, if you’re truly in pursuit of a mission that we believe is noble, positively impacting people’s lives every day and every home around the world, you won’t be wedded to just your idea. You’ll be able to see where your ideas fall short. You’ll be willing to pivot. You’ll be willing to course correct.

Now, it’s not for everyone, because some people like a really clear straight line. But I think the people that really thrive at SharkNinja, and I think one of the reasons why we’ve been able to take market share and not give it up, is because we are constantly looking at where we’re off track. There’s no yellow in SharkNinja. You’re either green or you’re red. There’s no yellow. You’re either winning or you’re losing. And if you’re losing, just acknowledge that you’re losing. The faster you can acknowledge that you’re losing, is the faster that you can make changes, pivot, and start heading towards winning.

BERMAN: Absolutely. Mark, what’s an example of a place where you got it wrong last year and you’ve reserved the right to get smarter and you’ve told your team you’re going to do it?

BARROCAS: So we tried too many things. In business sometimes, particularly in a business that is growing organically at the rate that we are, there’s a lot of shiny objects out there. And there’s a lot of people that are chirping at you saying, “We need to fix this and we need to do this, and we need to have that. And now we’re a $6 billion company and we won’t be able to scale to be a $9 billion company if we don’t do X, Y, Z.” And you start to say, “Oh, well, maybe you’re right.” And what we did is, we went too broad. We went after too many things in too many different areas. I think last year we bit off too much too fast. And as a result of it, I think we had to take a step back and say, “Look, we may ultimately long-term be the best technology company, but that’s going to take us some time. We’re not going to be able to do it overnight.”

Copy LinkHow SharkNinja is managing tariffs

BERMAN: COVID taught a lot of us a lot about supply chains. You’ve got a diversified supply chain, which is an advantage. We’re also in a moment where there are tariffs and there’s a threat of tariffs on us. Not asking you to get political, but as a business leader who’s dealing with uncertainty around this and threats of this, how are you all managing the business differently with that overhang?

BARROCAS: The culture piece that we just talked about. We thrive in uncertain times, okay. Because I think a lot of companies in uncertain times, they get paralyzed, they go to the easy answers: Cut advertising, cut R&D spending. I can tell you that on April 2nd, when the administration came out and announced the tariffs that they did, at 8:30 the next morning, so that was done at 4:30 in the afternoon, at 8:30 the next morning, we had a meeting with 100 of our most senior executives, and we already had very clear goals of exactly how we were going to mitigate those. We nearly shut down the entire company for a week. We focused on executing those. And we were able to mitigate 80% of those tariffs by the following Friday. 

So the first step is not coming to an easy answer that may have tough long-term consequences. And I think that companies that shut off their innovation engine and companies that shut off their marketing engine, it’s very, very hard to get that to turn back on over time.

On the supply chain side: Look, five years ago, we recognized we’ve got to diversify. And so four and a half years ago, we made our first product outside of China. By the end of this year, all of our US production will be able to be made outside of China. It took us four and a half years to build up the supply chain to be able to do it. I think ultimately today we’re a much healthier company. We’re diversified in a lot of different countries and a lot of different factories. I think we built up a lot stronger quality systems and manufacturing systems.

Copy LinkSharkNinja’s partnership with a16z

BERMAN: It also strikes me in this moment, like every company, artificial intelligence has a lot of promise for you all. Where have you all started implementing it where you’re seeing results? And what’s one place that you’re especially excited about the potential for AI with your business?

BARROCAS: So about a year ago, we met one of the largest venture capital firms in the country, a16z, and we started saying to them that we want to open our business up and be a canvas for your portfolio companies. You’ve got some amazing portfolio companies, let’s meet the founders and let’s start piloting ideas. And to date with them and others, we’ve piloted about 80 companies that have come in and done pilot examples, real life pilot examples of their technology. To date, we’ve taken about nine of those forward. A lot of the technology is very early stage. In concept it’s great, in application it’s just not well-developed enough. But quite frankly, I think nine out of 80 is a pretty good number.

And where am I most excited about today? I’m most excited about it in customer service. I think that today, SharkNinja sells about 160 different products. Our phones are answered by customer service agents that have to scroll through pages and pages of information. I think the ability for us to be able to deliver that to the consumer, that troubleshooting through AI, the possibility is extraordinary. I think it’s an enormous win for the consumer moving forward.

BERMAN: I love this, given how early we are and also how quickly the technology is evolving, the idea of partnering with a16z, with an incredible portfolio of AI or AI-led companies, and testing and learning and seeing what works. And yeah, I mean, you’ve got a better than 10% hit rate with them. They’re going to implementation. That’s pretty good. Where did that idea come from?

BARROCAS: If your mission is positively impacting people’s lives every day and every home around the world, it doesn’t need to be invented here. I think in a lot of companies, there’s this pride of authorship, of it has to be invented here. We have to do it all here and we have to figure it out, or we have to do Big Bang initiatives. I think that in product development, we work with countless numbers of experts. We might get to a product and we might realize, “Wow, we can’t figure out the gear system. Let’s go find the best and brightest people that are working on gears.” 

And I think that idea is sometimes very hard for people to get their head around. They feel like if they go to outside people, it’s a failure on their part. Particularly engineers feel this way, “Well, you hired me to solve the problem. You don’t trust me? Why do you want to go to someone outside?” But if you put the ego aside and it’s like you just want to develop the best possible thing for the consumer, all of a sudden it’s like, “Let’s go find the greatest people.”
I feel like, why don’t we go talk to 80 founders that are spending their entire lives trying to make the absolute best application. And why not partner with them to be able to deliver ultimately this to the consumer.

BERMAN: Well, I hope you’ll come back in a year or two and tell us what’s worked on that front and what you’ve learned. Thank you for being on Masters of Scale.

BARROCAS: Thanks so much.

BERMAN: There are so many valuable lessons Mark shared in this conversation, but one that will definitely stick with me is this, reserve the right to get smarter. Wherever you are in your career, constantly learning and never being afraid to pivot when you get that new insight, is the best way to reach new heights.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.